


there is no god and we are his prophets: other lives on the road

by interestinggin



Series: carry the fire: lives on the road [2]
Category: The Road - Cormac McCarthy, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Shaw wins, Apocalypse, F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, M/M, Nuclear Winter, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-17
Updated: 2013-11-17
Packaged: 2018-01-01 20:35:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1048304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/interestinggin/pseuds/interestinggin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>These are not the stories of our heroes. They are no less beautiful for that. </i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The nukes went off, and the humans did die, and the mutants did survive. In the cold and the snow and all the death that lurks on the road, somehow they must stay alive. A series of extracts from 'carry the fire'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there is no god and we are his prophets: other lives on the road

**Author's Note:**

> This story is based upon, draws inspiration from, and is heavily indebted to Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road', though it does not actually crossover with it at any point.
> 
> This fic, while less graphic than the first work in this series, still deals with themes of **death, pregnancy, violence, and nuclear fallout.** It also contains spoilers for 'carry the fire', so if you're planning to read that you should probably tackle it first - please see the end notes for spoilery warnings.
> 
> Thanks to [seranita](http://seranita.livejournal.com/) for her help with my German.

  
_These are not the stories of our heroes._

_They are no less beautiful for that._

**one.  
each the other’s world entire: remy and anna**

  
It is the day after the others left, and the house is quiet again. Neither of them are overly concerned. The silence is a comfort, a necessary part of this world, and they savour it like sunlight or rain that will never come.  
  
“You don’ actually wan’ me to make an honest woman outta you, do you?” Remy asks, as she buries her head against his shirt. She snorts.  
  
“Remy Le Beau,” she says, leaning up to kiss his shoulder, “you’ve never done an honest thing in yer wasted little life.”  
  
“You wound me, _chere_ , you always do.” He strokes fingers across her belly, swollen under the sweater, stretching it far too tight. Then he gets down on his knees, and rests his head against it.  
  
“ _Salut, bébé,_ ” he murmurs, pressing his lips to the fabric, drumming his fingers to the time of two hearts in one, to the time of everything he loves and holds dear. “’Ow you ‘oldin up in dere?”  
  
A gift; that is what she called it. Their warrant in this world, their passport to existence, their excuse to survive. Too much of Anna wants no part in this dead life, and wants to blow out all the ashes, kiss him hard on the lips, and sleep forever. But now there is something beautiful, something whole and real and living in this place of ice and silence, and every day it makes her laugh out loud.  
  
He caresses her like she is a holy relic, treats the child inside her womb like a saint or a blessing from the lips of Christ himself. He whispers words in French and English and dialects she doesn’t understand, even now when he has laid all his world open for her like a wound; words it is probable no-one in the world but him has spoken for months, and it feels good that her child will enter this world knowing them too.  
  
Anna is scared of dying in childbirth, but she has always been more scared of dying alone.  
  
And she does not fear that anymore.  
  
“He’s fine,” she says, gently trailing a finger along Remy’s cheekbone. It stops just short of his lips, and rests there. Remy looks up from the floor.  
  
“Anna,” he says, levelly, “ah am tryin’ to ‘ave a moment o’ paternal bonding wit’ my unborn babe. Must you degrade everythin’ righteous with your thoughts of filth?”  
  
“Ah think you must be seeing one of those other women, Remy,” she sighs, full of regret, “you never got time to love me anymore.” She runs the finger across his lips like a promise.  
  
Remy makes a noise in his throat that’s almost animal in nature, full of need and hunger and want, and then he has grabbed her waist, stood in one fluid movement, and pulled her hips towards his.  
  
“Now ‘ow would I be doin’ that, _amour,_ when you are quite literally de only girl in de world?” he growls, running his own gloved hands through her long hair, and she smiles against his chest; presses a kiss to the only parts of him she can, desperate for more and knowing she cannot have it. That they conceived would be a miracle anyway; youth ages fast and death follows birth with alarming rapidity nowadays. That they conceived when every touch of her skin brings unconsciousness and agony is nothing short of sacred.  
  
Remy says an angel flew overhead and gave her the power she needed, that night.  
  
Anna says that the only angel here is growing wings inside her, and that if God’s hanging around after this mess then she wants nothing more to do with Him.  
  
“Turn the stove off,” she says now, almost casually, “we won’t need it.”  
  
“Non?”  
  
“Non. Ah think ah‘ll be keeping you plenty warm tonight.”  
  
“Woman,” he mutters into her hair, pulling her back towards the bed, towards warmth and safety and the world that is theirs, that has nothing to do with the snow and the emptiness and never needed anyone else to be complete, “you know you are de t’ing dat makes my heart keep beating.”  
  
“You have my whole heart,” she whispers back, “y’always did,” and despite all that she knows she kisses him hard and full.

  
**two.  
call down your dark and your cold and be damned: scott and logan**   


  
Scott and Logan are heading for the mountains; only idiots would head for the sea. Logan has been to countries where the sea is frozen solid and the waves lap up onto snow covered beaches, cold enough to freeze you in a spray of sleet and ice. The mountains, though, have always been there, and the shells of long-dead trees mean there is some solitude and safety still to be had.  
  
Neither of them brings up the time that approaches where they will have to divide or admit they need each other; that would be a betrayal of everything they stand for, which is silence and antagonism and not dealing with feelings no matter how much you need to. There is nobody to call them on it, nobody but each other, and to do so would mean that there is no going back.  
  
On a certain day - neither of them take much note of such trivial things as sunrise or sunset, not when the ash has blotted out the sky and all of time is much of a limbo anyway - a party of raiders surprises them in the woods. Logan does not even put down his tin of beans as the leader cocks a gun.  
  
“Give us everything you’ve got,” she says, “and we won’t kill you.”  
  
“We haven’t got anything,” says Scott, looking bored as hell, leaning against Logan’s knees, his own legs wrapped tightly in a blanket and stretched out in front of him as far as possible, “so you’ll be getting a pretty awful deal there.”  
  
“You ain’t funny, Summers,” Logan says, forking another mouthful of beans into his mouth.  
  
“Oh, fuck you,” Scott growls.  
  
“Fine,” the woman says, and her free hand flares up with electricity, sparking in her grip, “then we will kill you. Either way’s good by me.” There’s blood at the corners of her mouth.  
  
Scott looks at her through his sunglasses, and then he stands, his long legs pulling him upwards with no interference from the rest of his body. “Eating people?” he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Seriously? You think that's big and clever? Or maybe it's just inevitable. _Jesus._ What are you, something out of an HG Wells novel?”  
  
“Didn’t he make Citizen Kane?” Logan asks, tipping the rest of the beans down his throat and chewing them violently.  
  
Scott pauses, and wonders how many ways there are to kill Logan. He knows Logan is technically invulnerable, but he’s sure if he was creative he could come up with a few. Logan spits out something unpleasant with a hawk of phlegm.  
  
He finally settles for “You are a spectacularly moronic creature, even by animal standards.”  
  
“That was a fuckin’ awful movie,” Logan continues, and then there are claws in his hands, and somehow without a beat there are claws in the woman’s throat, and she twists on the end of the metal, a scream bubbling up in blood through her throat that will never come out pure and strong, her hands grabbing for purchase on air denied to her lungs, “you know, they spent a whole film tryin’ to work out what Rosebud meant, and it turned out it was his goddamned toboggan. Talk about wasted hours. The fuck was the point of that?”  
  
Scott sighs, and lifts his sunglasses from his eyes. There is a flash that burns it’s way onto everyone’s eyeballs, and then two more of the gang are gone, nothing but scorch marks in the snow.  
  
“Don’t you ever get bored of stealin’ my kills, Cyclops?” Logan grins, casually decapitating another member of the group as he swings around. He is chewing some tobacco, ripped from a cigar that he has been rationing for many months. Scott curses it every evening when they are trying to sleep, and says it stinks. Then there is a grunt from his lips, and he looks down; fire in his chest, a spike sticking out of it. The woman with her hand outstretched and spikes protruding from her scaly skin looks shocked, scared almost.  
  
Scott picks up the gun from the ground and rounds off three head-shots at point blank range. She falls with her friends, not a sound from her lips. “Not yet,” he says grimly, “but I’ll keep you updated.” There is only one man left, and he screams, starts to run away amongst the trees. Scott raises the gun again, steady as a rock, and fires. The man’s head bursts open as the final bullet flies into his brain, blood staining the whiteness, and then they are left steaming and panting as the bloodlust fades away.  
  
“Fuckin’ raiders,” Logan spits, letting the wad of tobacco hit a tree. He rips the spike from his chest, and smashes it into the chest of the woman who let it fly. “That scar’s gonna take hours to heal.”  
  
“You and your precious little life, Logan,” Scott snorts. There is a pause - a pause in which the world comes roaring back - and he lets the gun fall from his hands.  
  
“She’d be furious if she was here, wouldn’t she?” says Logan.  
  
“Jean? Yeah. She hated this crap.” Scott sighs, and secures his sunglasses with one hand. Logan lets his claws slide back in, walks up to him, sudden and unexpected, and presses his lips hard against Scott’s; hard enough to bruise or bleed. Scott lets his mouth open, just as vicious in receiving as Logan is in giving, clenches his fists in Logan’s matted hair and presses his teeth to Logan’s lips.  
  
“She ain’t here,” Logan mutters into his mouth, “and I sure as hell ain’t her.”  
  
“I know that, now shut the fuck up,” Scott replies. He reaches for Logan’s belt; undoes it with fingers that are trembling in the cold air, and bares his teeth in victory as Logan hisses at the sudden exposure. He warms it up soon enough, and never smiles once. Neither of them do.  
  
If by doing this they can make the world seem like it has life again, who is left to judge them?  
  
There is no-one who knows they exist, because there is no-one else at all.

**three.  
damn you eternally have you a soul: kurt and talia**

  
Alone of all the people left on this earth, Kurt still prays. Watching Talia sleep at night, he curls up around her or goes a little way out of her hearing, and whispers to the God he knows full well is watching just how much he needs Him, how much he wants Him to hold him close, and how much with every fibre of his being he hates Him.  
  
 _< Father,>_ he whispers to the wind, _< I don’t understand. I do not understand why you have abandoned this land, why you would forsake the children you have made. Is it punishment for sin, Father? You know best of all that she has never sinned. How could she sin, in this world where there is no sin left to commit? How can you sin in Hell, in this Hell, where all things are permissible?  
  
I hate you, Father. I hate everything you have ever made. And when I see you at the last before you drag me back down to this for all eternity I shall fly at your throat and squeeze all the breath from it; drag you screaming down with me. For you have ruined your children and desecrated your promises, and if she is not your promise then you never meant to keep it.  
  
Just let me die, you bastard son of a whore. Let me die. Let me die->_  
  
 _“Vati?”_ Talia asks, sitting up slowly. He freezes where he is, genuflecting to the long and empty road, does not move his head to look her in the eye, afraid of what she might have heard. He needs not fear. She is the promise of God in this world, and she is everything he needs to be forgiven. She waddles towards him in her foolishly red wellington boots, dragging her blanket across the snow. _< Are you crying?>_ she asks, stroking the fur on his face with her tiny hands, wiping away tears that leave tracks in the hair.  
  
< _It's nothing, my darling_ ,> he says softly, kissing her on the forehead. < _Did you have another nightmare?_ >  
  
 _“Nein,_ ” she says simply. She kisses him on the nose, slings her arms around his neck (they almost reach) and sits herself down on his knees. _< Vati, does God love me?>  
  
<Yes.>  
  
<Does God love you?>_  
  
 _< Yes, my little princess, God loves your Vati,>_ Kurt says, sweeping her long black locks from her face.  
  
 _“Vati?”  
  
<Yes?>_  
  
 _< May we pray?>_  
  
He smiles. Some things in this world make it worth carrying on. He wishes he could be like everyone else on this dying planet that her other Father has abandoned like he will never be allowed to, and just not believe his tormentor exists. But he knows better, damn his open heart.  
  
< _Of course, my darling_ ,> he says, and together they bow their heads and pray to the one being Kurt hates above all others.

He cannot be grieving for this. Perhaps He is even laughing.

Her voice rises high above his, clear and bright and fair, and filled with the conviction Kurt is proud and ashamed to have taught her. Hope will do her no favours here.  
  
 _“Vater unser im Himmel…”_

**four.  
make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them: storm**

  
Her name is Ororo, or maybe it is Storm, and she is not afraid of this world.  
  
In the World Before; what she has come to think of the World With Sound, she could not vote, could not marry who she wanted, could not even go to school where she desired. She does not mourn that world, with all the stupid children of man, for all that it causes her sorrow to see what happened to them. And it truly does. But you only mourn that loss which you feel personally, and Storm does not feel anything for them.  
  
She is not afraid of this world, of raiders and blizzards and hunger.  
  
Things do not happen to Storm. Storm is what happens to them.  
  
Storm finds her way into raiders’ camps and summons the very sky above to come crashing down above their heads, and can make the blizzards more intense to throw them off her trail. Storm can make the clouds quake and call icy winds to chill the marrow of your bones. Storm has, truth be told, barely noticed the changes since the bombs. How could they possibly affect her, when she has total power over land and sea and sky?  
  
The only times she really notices are when she soars high above the layers of clouds that crackle around her skin, the charge like static sparking off, her eyes glowing white, and sees a dying sun, the light strangled and choked by nothing but smoke and ash. It sticks to her lungs and coats her mouth, and makes her plummet down at a fantastic rate until the rushing air cleans her out and gives her a chance to breathe free.  
  
Storm has no delusions about the future. There isn’t going to be one, but that’s more than fine by her, because she has absolutely no need for one.  
  
She meets a man like herself only once; a man she has no desire to kill. He says he was a prince, and perhaps that may be true, but all the kingdoms of the world are one now. He fought for freedom in his land and hers. She smiles, because freedom has come, but as it always would, it came with a price.  
  
It is a price she was willing to pay.  
  
“I am T’Challa,” he says later, buried to the hilt inside her, pushing her up against a tree with her long, lean legs wrapped tight around his waist. She says nothing in response, but lets out a deep and satisfied moan when she spasms, clenches tight, and comes long and hard.  
  
She moves on in the morning, and looks back only with fondness. In another life, she thinks, she could have grown to care for him; she could have married him, a man of courage and fortitude and nobility, and the qualities Storm prizes above all. In this world, Storm’s World, however, such sentimentality is nothing but shaming.  
  
For only a moment - a moment she will never let herself remember - she has a moment of regret, looking back as his dark shadow wrapped in a thick black cloak disappears off into the swirling white nothing, becoming a blur, and then fading away altogether. Storm shivers. The cold seeps in, through skin and bones.  
  
But she is queen of this empty, howling world, and that is more than she ever could have been in the World With Sound.  
  
“I am Storm,” she whispers to the vanishing night, “and this is the time of my dominion.”

  
**five.**   
**there is no other dream nor other waking world: charles.**   


  
It is in the dark times, when he is done coughing up the blood that gurgles through his red-raw throat and done with Erik's hand buried at the nape of his neck, just so, projecting thoughts that speak of platitudes like _I'm here_ and _It'll be alright_ that Charles knows everything at once. He cannot shut off his mind to that empty, howling blankness like all the others, cannot pretend that they are all each other has. He feels the grief of every one of them, every day - a hive of minds that all feel like his, and all need comfort.

Charles has taken on that role.

Subtly, bit by bit, he has removed the edge of the grief, like a carer, like a parent always should and never can. He cannot take it all, cannot take their memories and the things they have put in their minds that are there forever, but he can take the seeping edges and the sharpness and the tang of blood in their mouths and replace them with a haze, a mist that they will have to struggle through if they want total collapse. He trusts Erik not to let them stray far enough from the path to get there.

Charles used to be something, in the world before. He understood his role. Teacher. Friend. Brother.

Now he is none of those things, but he thinks perhaps he is becoming something more.

He remembers a time when he stood in the remnants of a high school classroom and looked at the charred desks, at the bodies slumped beneath them, at what might have been something to do with chemistry emblazoned on the blackboard, shielded by the screaming shadow of the teacher. He remembers it, and just as quickly replaces it with the kiss that Erik gave him, and the knowledge that their children will be safe.

He does not doubt that.

He never has.

Charles does not need to think of other lands, other lives, of worlds to come and worlds that were and worlds that never will be. He has only one now, and that will be enough. Whatever is to come - and whatever blackness awaits at the end of this night when the pull of sleep, blessed sleep, blessed silence in his mind becomes too much - he will face it with readiness. You get one life. You get one world. You get one long and tiring day. You make of it what you can.

And at the end you sleep.

And that is all there is.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains reference to the major character deaths in 'carry the fire'.


End file.
